In my career as an analyst, I knew many companies that lived and died by benchmarking. Even now, a day doesn’t go by without clients asking how their supply management performance measures up against their peers’.

Now I’m all for using benchmarks to baseline your organization’s performance. (Heck, I made a career out of performing such reviews.) Benchmarks are also handy for generating the “scare factor” required to secure budget and support from egomaniacal executives that would give up their first born before being outscored by their competitors or peers.

However, many supply managers (and C-level executives) fall into the trap of becoming so concerned (dare I say, obsessed?) with their benchmark performance that they lose sight of their business objectives. This sentiment was recently shared by Barclay’s Chief Procurement Officer John Kirby in a CPO Agenda rountable discussion of, you guessed it, U.K. CPOs.

“It’s important not to lose sight of the execution part,” said Kirby, who was joined by supply management execs from Lloyds, BP, British Gas, and, of course, CPO Agenda Editor in Chief Geraint John. “There are many organisations I’ve worked with where people are absolutely fascinated about how we compare with everybody else. I think it is important that you make that connection at the board level, but it’s also very important that you get down to the customer level - our internal customers and our external customers - and really understand what it is that the business is trying to deliver.”

Indeed, as profiled in a previous Supply Excellence post, Barclay’s unwavering focus on satisfying the “customer” has helped transform its supply management organization and standardize on a common supply management technology infrastructure — all while continuing its merger and acquisition (M&A) march toward its goal of becoming a Top 5 Global Bank.

To help drive this transformation, Kirby transitioned his team from myopically focusing on optimizing purchasing performance to understanding the implication of supply decisions on Barclay’s core banking business operations. “The question is: how does what you do every day translate into that value being enhanced?” Kirby told CPO Agenda.

Kirby demands that his team to spend less time benchmarking and more time where it counts — with customers and suppliers. He mandates that his team get out of the office to have sit downs with key internal stakeholders and external suppliers. The goal is to ensure a common understanding of the bank’s goals and business operations as well as an understanding of the objectives of individual stakeholders and suppliers.

As Kirby told CPO Agenda: “Until people can have those conversations at the business level with their functional partners, they will always be seen as somebody who is on the outside trying to help rather than somebody who is an integral part of delivering success.”

Hear more about Barclay’s supply management transformation first hand at Empower 2007. Register or get more details about Kirby and any of the other nearly 50 supply management execs presenting at Empower 2007 here.

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